The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

April 9, 2012

"Rowing Up Through the Silence" (on Tomas Tranströmer) by Douglas Messerli

rowing up through the
silence

By Douglas Messerli

Although I’ve never met Tomas Tranströmer nor
his wife Monika “in the flesh,” my life seems oddly intertwined with theirs.

For years I had heard in the poetry
circuit and through my Swedish friends about how remarkable Tomas Tranströmer’s
work was. However, when I read the available translations of the day by May
Swensen and Robert Bly, who helped to popularize his work in the US, I was
unimpressed. The work seemed to be fairly conservative and the syntax not that
highly interesting, so that I determined either he was not a very good poet or
that these poems were badly translated. Certainly his work did not seem as
exciting to me as Gunnar Eckelöf and others.

When
I was teaching at the University of Maryland while in Graduate School, one of
my best students, Jim Wine, now a long-time friend, took a couple of my
courses, including a course I was teaching for the German department on
Scandinavian fiction and another on Avant-Garde American Fiction. One day, he
stopped by my office to talk to me. He was in quandary. His girlfriend, whom he
declared he loved, was being sent back to Sweden, her Green Card having
expired. Even with the help of his ex-ambassador father, they could not
convince the authorities to let her stay. What was he to do? If he stayed in
school to finish his degree, he might possibly lose her forever, but if he did
follow her to Sweden, he might be unable to finish his education.

It
was a kind of catch-22 I felt. Neither choice seemed acceptable. Although I’d
never me Eva, I felt sure of Jim’s love for her, and I admired his
intelligence. How was I to advise him, however, on such a personal matter?

“Well,” I pondered aloud, “you can always finish your education, but you
mightn’t never again find a woman whom you love as much as her.” He followed my
advice and moved, temporarily, to Sweden. By accident, her family home was next
door to the summer home of the Tranströmer’s, and before long Eva and Jim had
become good friends with Tomas and Monica.

I
suggested that Jim tell Tomas about the predicament of his work in the US.
Although he was receiving attention for his poetry, it was apparently the
“wrong kind” of attention, allaying him with the conservative visions of Bly’s
“Deep Image,” instead of the more radical imagism that seemed to be in the work
itself, writing closer to Jerome Rothenberg's and Robert Kelly's original, more
radical notion of "deep image."

Time
passed, and eventually New Directions published his entire oeuvre, quite nicely
translated by Robin Fulton. Now I could read the work more sympathetically at
least.

Also
by coincidence, Tomas and Monica had befriended a young American translator
Michael McGriff and his wife Mikaela Grassl, and gave him permission to
translate a single-volume edition of Sorgengondolen
(The Sorrow Gondola), a title that
resolves the adjectivally based "Sad Gondola" of Fulton's
translation. McGriff sent the translation to me at Green Integer, which I readily
accepted, and in 2010 published.

A
few short months later, Tranströmer, after years of expectation, was awarded
the Nobel Prize, the Green Integer book being the most current translation. We
had originally published 1,000 copies, and now immediately printed 5,000 more
copies, the new edition touting the news of the Nobel Prize.

When
I look back, accordingly, on my long resistance and ultimate appreciation of
his work, it now appears that our relationship, as vague as it remains, seemed
to be something fated.

State
College, Pennsylvania, April 2, 2012

Presented as a lunch-time talk at a gathering
of Comparative Literature students and professors at Pennsylvania State
University on April 2, 2012.